category error

We're Getting A New Look

Look for a design overhaul and relaunch of category error around Columbus Day. For now, I'm off to the BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas....

Junk Cultural DNA

Reading The Art of Travel, by Alain de Botton, I came across a passage where he is describing the experience of the main character of a Huysmann novel and his wish to visit Holland.

[Des Esseintes] had imagined the place to resemble the paintings of Teniers and Jan Steen, Rembrandt and Ostade; he had anticipated patriarchal simplicity and riotous joviality, quiet small brick courtyards and pale faced milkmaids pouring milk. And so he had journeyed to Haarlem and Amsterdam -- and was greatly disappointed. The problem was not that the paintings themselves had lied -- the place did offer some simplicity and joviality, some nice brick courtyards and a few serving women pouring milk -- but rather that the promised gems were blended in a stew of ordinary images (restaurants, offices, uniform houses and featureless fields) that the Dutch artists had never painted and that made the experience of traveling in the country seem strangely diluted compared with an afternoon spent in the Dutch galleries of Louvre, where the essence of Dutch beauty found itself collected in just a few rooms.

Des Esseintes thus ended up in the paradoxical position of feeling more in Holland -- that is more intensely in contact with the elements he loved in Dutch culture -- when looking at selected images of Holland in a museum than when traveling with sixteen pieces of luggage and two servants through the country itself.

There are number of both trivial and important things brought up by this passage. The essay it is taken from, On Anticipation, is at this point, about the differences in the way we imagine a place from how it actually is, should we actually go there. His overall point is that it is the nature of both imagination and art to be more simplified than real life, something he applies to both fiction and travel writing.

But I see other things happening beneath the surface, whether important or not. One, of course, is the idolatry of preferring the image to the thing itself, but this is embodied (as the paintings are embodiments) in a viewpoint similar to that of the reductionist biologist and his dismissal of 95% of the DNA in an organism as "junk" because it serves no discernable purpose, and is often random and/or repetitive. Des Esseintes is "more intensely in contact with the elements he loved in Dutch culture" (it's all about me, dude!) because the art experience of Holland is less "diluted" by the reality (or banality) of the ground in which it exists, from which it has been distilled, refined, and manipulated to create those "gems."

While one can certainly live one's life that way, if one wishes (and is wealthy enough to do so) it is insane (deluded, not diluted) to think that this elision actually improves the experience. Just as with the junk DNA, the meaning of such gems is precisely their rarity, and in the absence of that rarity they lose thier power and become contemptible. To remove the common for the purpose of refining reality would be as foolish as to remove the control rods from a nuclear reactor, or the silence from a piece of music (after all, why not just concentrate on the notes, those sublime notes!). Or for the gourmet, in anticipaton of all the good meals in life yet to be eaten, to have them all brought immediately and eat them at once. One thinks the argument, seen this way would not be convincing.

You can no more have the refined without the foil of the banal than you can have the rich without the existence of the poor. Neglect the poor (too much) and you will cease to enjoy the privileges of wealth.

A last point to note. Even I think I would rather visit the Louvre than travel with sixteen pieces of luggage and two servants. The true benefit of great wealth would be to travel with nothing, buying what you need or like as you go. The way Des Esseintes travelled was a management nightmare. The mode of travel inevitably affects the experience of place, just as a landscape experienced walking (as de Botton dicusses later in his chapter on Wordsworth and the Lakes District) is very different from the same landscape seen from an airconditioned car on an expressway, so hitchiking is different from travelling with luggage and servants. In terms of reality, the proportion of banality / ground to epiphany / gem will not likely change (a point de Botton makes in his own imagination and recollections of a trip to Barbados in the same essay) but the particulars and the characters inevitably will.

The rising cost of fear itself

A Run on Terror

Posted on Thursday, March 4, 2004. Originally from Harper's Magazine, March 2004. By Luke Mitchell.

Sources

Terror, like ecstasy, tends to magnify perceptions. Just as affection becomes adoration in the physical act of love, so too does vigilance sometimes become morbid obsession in the face of spectacular violence. To be effective, this normal function of survival must also be temporary. It is now more than two years since our own national incident of spectacular violence, however, and although the United States remains obsessed, it is not unfair, or even insensitive, to begin considering the events of September 11 from a more detached perspective.

In 2001, terrorists killed 2,978 people in the United States, including the five killed by anthrax. In that same year, according to the Centers for Disease Control, heart disease killed 700,142 Americans and cancer 553,768; various accidents claimed 101,537 lives, suicide 30,622, and homicide, not including the attacks, another 17,330. As President Bush pointed out in January, no one has been killed by terrorists on American soil since then. Neither, according to the FBI, was anyone killed here by terrorists in 2000. In 1999, the number was one. In 1998, it was three. In 1997, zero. Even using 2001 as a baseline, the actuarial tables would suggest that our concern about terror mortality ought to be on the order of our concern about fatal workplace injuries (5,431 deaths) or drowning (3,247). To recognize this is not to dishonor the loss to the families of those people killed by terrorists, but neither should their anguish eclipse that of the families of children who died in their infancy that year (27,801). Every death has its horrors.